The sleet grew heavier, making the bushland feel threatening in the cloud-gloom wet. This was a bad place to be in a storm: it was said anything could happen in the Great Western Tiers. Kooparoona Niara in language, or ‘Mountain of Spirits’, they were the stark bluffs that bordered the Central Plateau. They were dense, claustrophobic, and dangerous. You could walk in circles for days and never see a path right beneath you, you could freeze to death in the snowstorms that came from nowhere, you could fall off a fog-hidden cliff or into one of countless ravines and never be found.

Warmth and feeling slowly re-entered her bare feet, stinging against the sharp gravel and icy water. She’d walked barely a minute when she heard the sound of a different bird – a yellow-throated honeyeater – far up ahead, a harsh raspy call that keeps other birds away from its territory. Or warns about the presence of people.

Eliza stopped and shivered.

This is your fault. You deserve this.

She tried to shut out memories of the old rhyme, the one they’d banned students from saying, the one even she and her sister used to whisper at night, giggling with the thrill of fear. The town of Limestone Creek, nestled at the base of the Tiers, had only ever known one monster; the bodies of those girls had never been found.

She stepped off the path again, into a copse of mountain needlebush that scratched her skin, and walked beside the trail, creeping low to the ground. Her feet stung. Her jacket snagged and tore. She’d lost an earring – now a golden hoop dangled from only her left ear.

And then, a minute later, she heard heavy footsteps in the scrub, matching her every step.

She didn’t stop. She kept creeping.

‘Just your imagination,’ she whispered.

The scrunch-thud of footsteps, the scratch of ferns and branches.

She didn’t look.

If she didn’t look, she would be okay.

The legend said that if you didn’t see his face, he wouldn’t take you.

CHAPTER 1

MURPHY

The morning before

Murphy sighed. ‘We are not having this conversation again.’ He was shirtless, sitting at their rickety dining table, speaking loudly over the thumping Jon Bellion song playing from the bluetooth speaker in the corner. ‘Camping is good for you.’

‘I can help out at home,’ wheedled his 16-year-old daughter, Jasmine. She was leaning on the table, their chubby black-and-white cat Myrtle squirming in her arms. ‘I can mow the lawns. I can clean the windows —’

‘School. Get.’ Murphy lifted a clump of the sweet, sticky marijuana that covered the table and placed it on the electric scales.